What happens when you have a weak technical leadership? It builds dissent among everyone working on it. But how does this happen?
With a software project, more often than not, the people working in the lower ranks of the project tend to be fairly smart themselves. This means that they have their own ideas about what’s good or bad about the decisions being made. This leads to the members of the team talking to each other about why the future of the project is bleak or why working on the project is hard.
Having a general air of negativity on a project engenders a negative culture and encourages people to spend their days complaining about why things are hard rather than their work done. This leads to shorter timelines and even more poor planning. It’s a vicious cycle.
Breaking this cycle needs the following steps:
- Open up the floor to comments. Having a discussion will help people to feed off each other to turn general complaints into specific issues. These comments will be the basis for creating a plan on how to fix it.
- Take the time to make a plan. This certainly does not require everyone’s input in making a plan. This is the chance for the technical leaders to shine and demonstrate their knowledge and skill.
- Present and review the plan. In presenting the plan, it forces the leaders to have to defend and justify the plan. It also should be a time to review the plan and adjust it as needed. If sufficient criticism is made about the plan, then take a step back and prepare another plan and review session.
- Deploy the plan. With everyone’s buy-in, the plan will blossom and foster positive energy.
Doing these things, of course, requires the decision to undertake them. Hopefully the leaders within your company will be able to see the forest for the trees.
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